Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

The following phonemic processes should have occurred in Proto-Hurro-Urartian
and Hurrian in the pre-written history of the word enda-. The vowel in the first syllable
of the stem was dropped as in some Northeastern Caucasian languages and in Proto-
Northwestern Caucasian. A prothetic vowel developed before the initial consonant as
in many other Hurrian words. 48 The final vowel was preserved. Labial sonants were
dropped as in many other cases. 49 The affricate changed into a stop after a nasal. The
special development of non-emphatic affricates in such a position had been discovered
earlier 50 , but this particular case may now be elaborated. There are at least two more
correspondences proving the phonetic law according to which the original combination
nasal + affricate > nasal + stop: Hurrian wa a -an-ta-ri-ni-na-a = Hittite logogram
(Sumerogram) MUHALDIM “cooks”, in the description of a feast in the
Netherworld in the bilingual text (K Bo XXXII 13 I 22-II 22), is understood by Neu as a
Plural with an article: *[fandarinina]; a syncopated form of this Plural reappears in
another part of the text where a half-mythological story connected to Ebla is told:
Hurrian pa-an-ta-ri-in-na = Hittite logogram MUHALDIM. 51 The initial *f/v(a)- of
the word for “cooks” is rendered in the bilingual text in the first case by a special
cuneiform sign (a combination of the sign for wa with a sign for a inscribed in the lower
right-hand part of the former) used only for Hurrian, Hattic and Palaic texts in
Bo azköy archives to denote a specific fricative labial absent in Akkadian or Hittite. In
the second occurrence of the form, the same initial is written with the sign pa-. In the
form beginning with this specific Hurrian fricative phoneme, one may suppose a trace
of the old Proto-North Caucasian prefix of the plural of the class of male human
(“reasonable”) beings. After the final group of suffixes -in(i)na- is separated, the
remaining stem (f/va)-ndar- may be directly identified with the Proto-North Caucasian
*-Èmd´zËr- “to bake, roast”, reconstructed on the basis of verbs like Lezghi * ? iÇ:ar- “to
bake, roast, boil” > Ç:ra, Archi Çar-, Chechen att- “to bake, roast”, Northern Western
48 Diakonoff and Starostin 1986, 22, correspondences 23-24; 51-52, correspondences 125-126; 58,
correspondence 144; 64-65, correspondences 166-167; Starostin 1995a, 133, etymology 2.
49 Starostin 1998.
50 Diakonoff and Starostin 1986, 41.
51 K Bo XXXII 15 I 27’-28’-II 27’-29’. Neu 1996, 260, 336-337, 339, 450, 110.